Credit: RobertG, via Wikimedia Commons
(Modified by zstansfi)
I feel it is important to engage in discussion of specific criticisms against my positions and to use these criticisms as a way to instruct us on how our beliefs may lead us astray.
Previously I discussed a post written by Professor WR Klemm on Brain Blogs addressing what he believed to be a core piece of evidence that supports his belief in free will. I showed that while his criticism of a specific set of experiments was valid (a negative claim), this particular piece of evidence does not provide positive evidence in support of his notion of free will.
Today I will tackle another post promoting free will, written by John Horgan at Scientific American.
Horgan states that while he accepts the existence of physical constraints which limit his ability to choose, he still has free will. Specifically he states
But just because my choices are limited doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Just because I don’t have absolute freedom doesn’t mean I have no freedom at all. Saying that free will doesn’t exist because it isn’t absolutely free is like saying truth doesn’t exist because we can’t achieve absolute, perfect knowledge.
Harris keeps insisting that because all our choices have prior causes, they are not free; they are determined.
There are numerous points of contention here, and I will illustrate where Horgan makes logical errors.
The first is the common straw man criticism which assumes a conflict between free will and determinism. In fact, the conflict at hand is between free will and an absence of free will, sans determinism. One does not need to evoke hard deterministic statements in order to completely and irrevocably destroy the very notion of free will. In other words, we can use empirical knowledge to attack the positive claims made by free will enthusiasts without taking specific positions on the extent to which human activities are “determined”.
A second assertion of Horgan’s about the nature of choice further illustrates just how wrong his thinking is. It would be ridiculous to assert, given the false nature of absolute free will, that therefore we cannot talk about choice while under constraint. In fact, we can talk about constraints on action and in so doing create a useful definition of choice–but this definition must be entirely divorced from any notions of free will. However, Horgan’s error is that unwittingly conflates these two propositions (constrained choice and free will) throughout his entire screed.
Horgan illustrates this error in two ways. The first is by constructing a false continuum. This is a proposition where a person takes some set of statements or variables which are independent and then illustrates continuity between them. For example, we might be able to illustrate a continuous set of truths, ranging from isolated and incidental laboratory observations to features of reality so universal that they can be codified into mathematical laws. But whereas these measures of physical reality can be compared and contrasted on a relative scale, they cannot be compared to Absolute Truth or divine providence, which is entirely discontinuous with respect to them.
Similarly, we can discuss the human ability to choose from a constrained set of options as existing along a continuous scale where specific actions are constrained more or less for different individuals. In contrast, Free Will is entirely isolated from this continuous scale. Horgan is correct in noting that constraints differ in their impact on human action, but incorrect in ascribing this reality to the notion of free will, which inherently assumes the potent, universal meaning which has been endowed upon it by western culture—free will must always assume that mental events somehow provide humans with an out from the constraints they face. It refers to humans as having a specific state of nature in which we are the first cause for our actions.
In brief, free will and choice under constraint do not exist along a continuum.
One might argue that this is not what they mean when they talk about “free will”. But if once we take this feature away the term “free will” loses all meaning and might as well be discarded (the very point that Harris makes in his book). It becomes incoherent by its own nature. This issue isn’t just limited to esoteric philosophical discourse. In fact, it is especially true in common use when we assert that a person is “free”, we often ignore the totality of constraints on that individual’s actions and emphasize the ability of that person to work around these constraints. Thus, while it is undoubtedly useful to take this perspective in cases where the constraints are easily overcome (“I had this feeling that I couldn’t do it, but once I tried it was actually quite easy.”), when these constraints are so complete as to be suffocating, such free will based prescriptions are meaningless (“I just had this feeling that I had to keep hitting him, you know, it was in the moment and I didn’t even have a thought that I should stop.”).
Horgan illustrates this error when he falsely dichotomizes two instances of choice under constraint. He writes:
Here’s the difference. The man with a tumor has no choice but to do what he does. I do have choices, which I make all the time.
In essence, Horgan argues that this distinction exists because constraints on our actions are physical (e.g. a tumor), whereas non-physical entities such as thoughts or ideas are within the realm of free will, and so can be chosen or selected from by each individual.
He notes:
But the strange and wonderful thing about all organisms, and especially our species, is that mechanistic physical processes somehow give rise to phenomena that are not reducible to or determined by those physical processes. Human brains, in particular, generate human minds, which while subject to physical laws are influenced by non-physical factors, including ideas produced by other minds. These ideas may cause us to change our minds and make decisions that alter the trajectory of our world.
But this is where Horgan essentially goes off the deep end. He is using an intuitive belief in the fuzzy notion of free will to try and distinguish between himself and this man suffering from a specific brain complication. Horgan goes on to assert in an extended and seemingly incomprehensible rant just how mental processes are non-physical and therefore aren’t subject to physical constraints–thus explaining why he has free will (unlike the hypothetical man with a tumor). But this is all besides the point. In reality, both Horgan and this man are influenced by physical constraints, and he’s obscuring this fact by formulating a non-equivalent comparison.
We can understand the problem here by directly comparing Horgan to the man with a brain tumor. Unlike the man with a tumor, we might assert that Horgan can control his violent impulses successfully. This makes intuitive sense because while we can detect the physical instantiation of a tumor using an MRI there is no way to detect what physical constraints his Horgan’s brain might place on him on a daily basis. However, we can speculate based upon Horgan’s relatively benign life: in fact, unlike the man with the tumor, Horgan is incapable of not controlling his violent impulses! Regardless of what Horgan might assert, he is not free to go on a murderous rampage. It’s just not in his cards.
Importantly, by doing away with the notion of a “free will” we are left with a more tractable ability to evaluate the actual constraints that exist in a situation and how to deal with them, rather than presuming isolated instances where constraints are absolute (such as when a person goes on a rampage after a tumor presses upon his amygdala) and comparing those situations to ones where choice exists (e.g. John Horgan’s decision to write an essay supporting free will).
To sum up:
A case can be made for discussing human action in terms of choices under constraint, where specific situations are greatly limited in their possible outcomes and so it is important to evaluate what the limiting factors are and how to change them. However, this state of affairs has little use for incoherent notions like free will. If we need to rely upon the belief that mental events are somehow uncoupled from our physical reality in order to explain free will, then we’ve run into a problem. In this instance, Horgan makes no realistic attempt to address how ideas can propagate between minds without affecting the physical status of the underlying brains, so his use of “free will” appears to be extraneous. In short, we can see how when we extract the concept of free will from absolutist beliefs about human agents as the “first cause” of their actions, then both the common and philosophical notions of free will become untenable.